Becky Suss: Night House at Jack Shainman Gallery

Becky Suss was born in Philadelphia in 1980 and still works there. She holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, and has received a Pew fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. Her subject has long been the domestic interior, from her grandparents' home to rooms imagined from works of fiction.

Night House, now at Jack Shainman Gallery in Chelsea, gathers new paintings that change the terms of her practice. Suss is known for bright, saturated color, and in her earlier work that pervasive light blurred any sense of the hour. Here her palette turns to many blacks, greys and deep blues, each shaped by delicate shifts of light. Night, usually a time of rest and transition, becomes a way to look at what tends to be overlooked.

The rooms are empty of people, yet busily patterned wallpaper and shelves crowded with books and trinkets suggest those who are absent. Flattened architecture, exaggerated proportions and warped perspective echo the way a remembered image slides between fact and fiction, and Suss accepts that instability rather than correcting it. The dark pigments are layered so each composition keeps shifting as the eye adjusts, revealing new depth the longer one looks.

The show opens with Night Garden, a house seen from outside under moonlight falling from above the canvas edge, and the paintings that follow look inside. Windows recur, letting in landscapes that are by turns flowering and frozen, and the trees, foliage, snow and ice outside are echoed in the wallpaper within. Paintings, statues, ceramics and small keepsakes inside these rooms raise questions about what a culture values and chooses to preserve.

Titles on view include Night House Living Room, Night House Garret, Night House Lulu and The Magic Mountain, along with Moonlight after Blakelock, Sunset After Vallotton, an album of Chopin's Nocturnes, and a jigsaw puzzle of a Matisse painting. The exhibition runs through October 31, 2026.